Rankings: a rant.

If someone asked you to guess what number The Thirty-Nine Steps was on the Guardian newspaper's list of A Hundred Best Novels, what would you say?

Fifty-six? 

All right, then.

Now suppose the other person asked you to guess again and gave you the clue higher!

Would you guess it was number seventy-five or number twenty-eight?

I keep on hoping that this language stuff will start making sense at some point.

But it never does.

Word To Use Today: rank. This word came to us from Old French, where it was spelled ranc. Before that it was a Germanic word. The Old High German hring means circle and may be something to do with it.

The answer, by the way, is forty-two.